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The Indispensable Man

Founding Father Rediscovering George Washington. By Richard Brookhiser. 230 pp. New York: The Free Press. $25.

He is with us every day, on our dollar bills and quarters. He looks down on us from Mount Rushmore. In the national capital that bears his name he has the most prominent memorial, the largest tribute to patriarchy ever built. More schools, streets and cities bear his name than that of any other American, and historians consistently rank him, along with Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt, as one of our three greatest Presidents. After he died in 1799, a Congressional resolution provided his epitaph: "First in war, first in peace and first in the hearts of his countrymen."

But Richard Brookhiser believes that the omnipresence of George Washington does not translate into familiarity. "He is in our textbooks and our wallets," Mr. Brookhiser observes in "Founding Father," "but not our hearts." That is partly Washington's fault, since he possessed distancing mechanisms second to none; his eloquent silences made him America's version of the Delphic oracle. Also, he became a living legend so early in his career that the historical record is clotted with patriotic rhetoric of the most platitudinous kind, blocking access to the human features behind his masks.

Yet Mr. Brookhiser effectively argues that we ourselves are implicated in making Washington an anonymous American hero. Our talk-show culture demands at least a taint of scandal. Thomas Jefferson's putative liaison with Sally Hemings makes him seem more interesting, more like us. Washington is boringly pure, apparently beyond temptation. We also prefer our heroes to be martyrs, like Lincoln or John F. Kennedy, whose premature departures allow us to conjure up intriguing might-have-beens. We even admire soldiers who are honorable losers, like Robert E. Lee. Washington, however, won his war and completed all his public assignments, then retired to Mount Vernon to die naturally of pneumonia, or perhaps of the bleeding and blistering inflicted on his fading body by the misguided physicians of the day.

Finally, our scholarly gatekeepers favor memorable phrasings and literary eloquence, like the natural rights section of Jefferson's Declaration of Independence or Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. But Washington never made the most famous statement attributed to him -- "I cannot tell a lie" -- and was a man of action rather than words. There are no memorable quotations inscribed on the walls of the Washington Monument.

Mr. Brookhiser has decided to retrieve as much of the elusive Washington as possible, in the apparent belief that he still has much to teach us. His goal, as he puts it, is "moral biography," and his avowed model is Plutarch's "Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans."

From the outset, then, "Founding Father" runs directly against the grain of modern biography, which, as Janet Malcolm has so candidly stated, is driven by the urge to expose and eviscerate. We read biography, according to this view, for the same bloodthirsty reasons we go to stock car races and boxing matches. Mr. Brookhiser is also running against strong scholarly trends, which envision the American past as a contaminated swamp positively brimming with ideological diseases like racism, sexism and patriarchy. And his subject is nothing less than the most prominent dead-white-male in American history.

Moreover, Mr. Brookhiser is not a card-carrying historian who has lived in the 18th century for a long time. He is a journalist, a senior editor at National Review, who is merely taking an excursion into the past. For all these reasons, this smallish book (another defiant gesture, a biography that can be read at one sitting) has much to overcome. One starts it with the foreboding sense that there is really no way he can bring it off.

But he does. One puts down "Founding Father" with a heightened appreciation for Washington's seminal achievements as a soldier and a statesman and a similar sense of admiration for the stylishly elegant way Mr. Brookhiser arranges his own thoughts and words. Somehow, he gets the Delphic oracle to speak, and does so without wrenching him out of his 18th-century context. Indeed, it is that very context, a world where self-restraint trumps self-expression, where impersonality outshines authenticity, that Washington so epitomized and that we are asked to measure against our own.

Half the book is devoted to reviewing Washington's career. We follow him from his early military failures in the French and Indian War, through his leadership of the Continental Army during the American Revolution, his retirement and return to preside over the Constitutional Convention, then his two terms as America's first President. This is a familiar story that earlier biographers and historians have told in considerably greater detail. The emphasis here is on what we might call Washington's essentialism, his eerie ability to know where history was headed.

How did Washington do it? Well, the second half of "Founding Father" is a meditation on that question. Suffice it to say that Mr. Brookhiser does not think psychologizing about mothers or fathers, real or imagined, will get us very far. We get glimpses at Seneca's "Morals" and Joseph Addison's "Cato" as influential books, and also at Christianity and Freemasonry as influential bodies of thought. The freshest and most intriguing candidate for influence is a guidebook called "The Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior in Company and in Conversation," based on teachings by 16th-century Jesuits, which Washington copied out when he was 16. How he managed to internalize these values is, of course, the great mystery. And Mr. Brookhiser prefers to involve us in searching out our answers rather than declare his own.

Washington's timing was perfect. His own character congealed in the mid-1760's, just as his fellow Virginians were looking for leadership and his fellow American colonists were questioning their own identity as British subjects. After that, the familiar story almost tells itself. Washington will cast his lot with the patriot party, risking all for a political principle. He will lead the American Army in an apparently hopeless fight against the most formidable military power in the world, and win. He will invest his enormous reputation in behalf of a Federal Constitution of questionable legality, and make it work. He will define, first by his obvious though undeclared candidacy, then by his precedent-setting policies, the office of the American Presidency. He will make many small mistakes along the way, but get all the big things right.

The prose of "Founding Father" mirrors its message. It wastes few words, commits a few minor sins of cuteness and present-mindedness, but has perfect pitch for Washington's language. Given the complexity of the historical issues at stake, there are countless places where a journalistic visitor could go wrong in a big way. But whether it is Washington's near-fatal tactics on Long Island in 1776 or his diplomatic maneuverings around the Jay Treaty of 1795, Mr. Brookhiser gets it right. He also has the courage of his idiosyncrasies, devoting considerable space to the way Washington's huge physique defined the space around it, summing up other luminaries with minimalist precision. Jefferson, for instance, "had the deep deviousness that is given only to the pure of heart."

Historians usually answer the old chestnut about history making the man or the man making history in favor of the former. (It is our professional prejudice.) But Washington just might be the exception that proves the rule. Even when it came to slavery, the one great failure of the revolutionary generation, he made a point of identifying it as a failure. And unlike all the other Virginians who ascended to fame with the American Revolution, including Jefferson and James Madison, Washington freed all his slaves in his will; as always, he pointed the way. IT has often seemed some combination of mystery and miracle that a conclave of 13 separate colonies with a total population less than that of modern-day Los Angeles could produce a gallery of leaders capable of winning and then securing national independence. Alfred North Whitehead once said that there were only two instances in human history that he knew of when the leaders of an emergent empire performed as well as we, in retrospect, could ever expect. The first was Rome under Caesar Augustus. The second was the United States under George Washington. He was, of course, surrounded by other greats, but they all agreed that he was the indispensable man, and the greatest of them all.

"Founding Father" is a little tour de force that revisits all these issues with great style and wit. I would not equate it with the multivolume biographies of Washington by Douglas Southall Freeman or James Thomas Flexner. It is too brief and does not try to tell the whole cradle-to-grave story. It belongs, instead, alongside another minor classic on Washington, Marcus Cunliffe's "Washington: Man and Monument." And on the same shelf with Plutarch.